Theodora: Empress of Byzantium (Mark Magowan Books) (12 page)

In all likelihood, high-ranking dignitaries and wealthy traders would set Theodora up in apartments or villas that they owned, equipped with maids and eunuch servants, so that they could easily visit her: provided, however, that she led a discreet life and kept herself available. Some delightful residences outside the city, along the verdant banks of the Propontis (today’s Sea of Marmara) were the favored locales for this. They were the precursors of the Ottomans’ waterside residences (
yali
) that so enchanted European travelers and Turkish potentates long after the seventh eon, when Constantinople had already become Istanbul. The young actress was no doubt seduced by the Asiatic shore of the Propontis, just as she was drawn to it even after she became empress. There she may have found moments of rest and quiet, her leisure time. Interrupting her refreshing naps and her beauty treatments to welcome her lover of the moment, she might have been reminded of what enchanted her most in that arrangement: crossing the strait in a felucca (a small open boat), with eunuchs and maids holding a canopy to shield her face from the strong rays of the sun, the wind filling her skirts, the dolphins leaping, the schools of tuna knifing though the water, and finally, the skyline of the city seen from the east. It was a skyline that she herself would change one day.

When her lover was kept in the city by urgent business and she was
seized by a sudden need for company, she would probably dispatch a servant to the city before evening with invitations for friends or colleagues to join her at the villa. Jealous admonitions from her lover were to be expected, but she could probably bring his smile back easily, just as she turned quarrels into laughter on the stage. As her beauty was greater than any eloquence, Theodora did not need many words. Her lover, on the other hand, might carry on promising her many things, dazzled by her face and her body. Theodora knew the art of listening. For her, it was closely tied to the art of obtaining.

Lacking affectation and never ill at ease, she most likely found it amusing to be the only woman in the company of men—mime colleagues and the sort of people who are always drawn to the world of entertainment, in every era, all over the world. Priests and monks were excluded, of course, and very rarely did conversations touch on the single or double nature of the Incarnated Christ (these were issues best left to the Monophysites and the Dyophysites) or the political and military situation at the Persian front. Frequent subjects of conversation were the exploits of the Green or Blue teams and their enthusiasts, the whimsical enthusiasms of Emperor Anastasius, or the rumors from the entertainment capital of late antiquity, the city of Antioch (then part of Syria, now in modern Turkey). The wealth of dignitaries and foreigners took on legendary qualities: one had to get introduced to them and introduce them in turn to others, and try to organize expensive plays and parties in each unique, incomparable mansion.

When the conversation turned to other women, or when other women joined in, Theodora might have knit her brow. Her unfailing denigrator writes that she was poisonous and ruthless toward female colleagues, to the point of being “very envious and spiteful”
¹¹
of them. More probably, she reacted with early diffidence that could turn into hostility. Because she could benefit from men through her wiles, she saw other women as alternative Theodoras, rivals who could not and should not be given any room to maneuver. She also had the perennial complex of the prima donna, combined with that ever-present, sometimes forced competitiveness among “stars” that has always permeated the world of sports, the circus, music, and the theater—environments
always marked by informal relationships and lifestyles, implicitly founded upon a casual approach in sexual customs, among other areas of life.

14. Mosaic peacock, c. 545–50, basilica of San Vitale, Ravenna.

Theodora performed not only in the public theaters before easy-to-please audiences but also in other, more prestigious locales, such as the private homes of illustrious dignitaries and upright Christian matrons. In public, their calm looks and sophisticated ears did not betray an appreciation for the mime’s coarse humor, but in the privacy of their homes they would turn that same commonness into an exclusive attraction, for their own entertainment and that of selected guests. Our young star and her theater company might have been cautiously approached by a eunuch majordomo charged with arranging a date and compensation for their performance in a great city residence. Decorated with rich floral arrangements and ancient polychrome statues of gods and heroes, those mansions had sumptuous furnishings, and
enchanting floor mosaics whose elaborate scenes danced in the flickering light of torches.

Theodora must have admired the mosaic tesserae, the tiny chips of marble, terra cotta, and glass paste that formed idyllic scenes from the Golden Age or the Garden of Eden, with peacocks, flamingoes, fish, and plants of the great river Nile, and crocodiles hiding among the rushes [
fig. 14
], or the allegories of the Virtues cherished by the pagan world and later embraced by the common culture of Christianity—Temperance, Generosity, Mercy: all words that Theodora knew well.

While she readied herself for the performance, Theodora might have seen the lady of the house stroll around her peristyle or cloistered garden amid ponds, delightful fountains, and rose bushes studded with buds as abundant as the jewels that adorned the lady herself. The lady of the house would show the fine decorations to her important guests, easily alternating between Latin and Greek, her mastery of the languages reflecting her perfect control of the situation.

These occasions allowed the young actress to fully grasp the meaning of what the Greeks called
kyria
and the Romans
domina
: “mistress,” “lady.” A lady never needed to chase after things, or to struggle to keep what she had.

Theodora was due to perform at any second. She waited. She could still only vaguely glimpse real life, the life of the men and women who count and who are in charge, who decide whether and when to speak. She had come a long way from the day she and her family pleaded in the Kynêgion, stepping out of the barrel-vaulted passageways under the arena. Now she was standing behind an embroidered velum, the curtain that separated one room from another, which can be seen in so many mosaics and frescoes [figs. 1, 15] of antiquity and late antiquity. Theodora might have glimpsed the guests reclining on precious triclinia, the Roman dining couches. She might have listened to the mingling of Greek and Latin, which meant that important dignitaries and military officers were present. She might have glimpsed the vaulted dining room recess, where servants prepared dishes that pleased the guests’ eyes even before they began to eat. Thracian game was garnished
in elaborate shapes, bowls of water perfumed with oils were offered to the diners to clean their fingers, and shining goblets were filled with Cypriot wine.

15. Mosaic depicting a palace with vela (curtains), early 6th century, church of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna.

For the daughter of the bear keeper, it was at once a vision and a challenge. She was filled with sadness, nostalgia, and energy all at once. She could not contain the passion surging through her; the ancient Greeks had called that passion
thymos.
¹²

And now the musicians beat their
sistra
; Theodora made her entrance into the large dining room, running through her show from the very slow opening to the excited finale, in a late-ancient version of the Mediterranean belly dance or in a foreshadowing of the bolero. Seized with passion, she gave an outstanding performance that people remembered and spoke about for years, though in the
Secret History
we find only a pale, generic echo of the event: “On one occasion she entered the house of one of the notables during the drinking, and they say that in
the sight of all the banqueters she mounted to the projecting part of the banqueting couch where their feet lay, and there drew up her clothing in a shameless way, not hesitating to display her licentiousness.”
¹³
According to Procopius, it was an impromptu performance, the drunken exhibition of a Bacchante; but in truth she and her mime troupe were the attraction of the evening (and of many evenings like this).

Theodora was sought out, admired, and applauded by the same high society that publicly feigned indifference. But it happened in private, at banquets in the great city mansions or in the secluded and exclusive seashore villas where the rich and powerful enjoyed their leisure hours on the Bosphorus outside the city. While touching the relics of a saint or a holy man benefited the soul, being grazed by Theodora’s garment in the street, maybe along the Mesê (Constantinople’s main artery for traffic and trade that ran west from the Hippodrome to the Golden Gate, and north to the church of the Holy Apostles), was considered a contamination, for she was, after all, an actress and thus taken for a whore.
¹⁴
What is more, any exchange of words, any form of public recognition connecting the world of that disreputable woman with the world of respectable people, would be an unbearable scandal. It was for this very reason that Asterius had not uttered a word in answer to the plea of Acacius’s widow and children on that distant but unforgotten day in the Kynêgion.

In such a context of denial and perversion, it was easy to say and write of her that she seemed to have “her privates not where Nature had placed them in other women, but in her face!”
¹⁵
Procopius’s conclusion seemed to follow logically, but only if we believe that Theodora’s body was ruled by lust, reacting to lust like a perfectly tempered mechanism.

ANY CENTURIES
after Theodora, thousands of miles from Constantinople, a twenty-year-old actress left Sweden for the United States. Greta Lovisa Gustafsson soon became a movie star under the name of Greta Garbo, but for many years her admirers could not hear her voice. When talking pictures were invented, the 1930 posters advertising her starring role in
Anna Christie
proclaimed: “Garbo talks.” The first words of her sound debut were carefully chosen: “Give me a whiskey, ginger ale on the side; and don’t be stingy, baby.”
¹
These few words made her low, throaty voice unforgettable. Central to the plot of the film, the words also marked her from the start as a feminine ideal: an emancipated woman with a takecharge attitude, precise and on her own. This was the “Garbo style.”